Prior to landing an aircraft at an airport, a pilot needs to know airport environmental conditions in order to make any necessary adjustments to a flight plan. The final approach of the aircraft to the airport is the highest workload time of the entire flight for the pilot. Changes that are made to the flight plan at this time increase head-down time and lower pilot situation awareness.
Pilots typically have to radio forward to the airport to get an audio representation of the airport environmental conditions such as wind conditions. While more advanced aircraft control systems have been developed for use in certain aircraft, environmental data is still in many cases not easily accessible to the pilot during flight or excessive pilot interaction is required to retrieve the data during high workload phases of flight. Currently, pilots have to use the environmental data they do receive to make their own determination of which runway approach is optimal for landing the aircraft. While some standard aircraft control systems provide surface wind indicators to pilots, the pilot is still required to make further decisions based on the surface wind information.
One system that has been developed for use in aircraft navigation is known as AWIN (Aviation Weather Information), which is an on-board avionics application that provides real-time graphic aviation weather information to pilots. The AWIN system includes software, data, and data link applications, which provide user-friendly, color weather graphics such as composite-radar mosaic, lightning-strike data, wind data, satellite images, and forecasts. The AWIN system further integrates existing textual AIRMET (Airman's meteorological information), terminal area forecasts, aircraft present position, and flight plan information into a single-source pilot workstation.
Some aircraft control systems use METAR (Meteorological Terminal Aviation Routine Weather Report), which is a format for reporting weather information from airports. Such information can include temperature, wind conditions, cloud conditions, visibility, etc. The METAR may also provide information on convective activity, precipitation type, precipitation amounts, lightning, and other information that would be of interest to pilots.
In a typical flight scenario, the pilot collects disparate, unfused data from multiple sources as he or she has time. The pilot then fuses and interprets the data/situation. The pilot manually enters plan changes into a navigation system, which includes many steps, and then flies according to the plan. The unfused data can include an aircraft operation performance model comprising take off and landing distance, weight/balance, and aircraft crosswind performance envelope; METAR-current winds and weather; terminal area forecast (TAF); automatic terminal information service (ATIS) radio current winds; runway-in-use; flight service station (FSS) radio enroute; ground weather terminals; visual conditions; flight experience; domain knowledge; airport environment such as runway conditions and density altitude; approach path; charts/maps/plates; XM satellite weather graphics; flight information system, ground-based VDL (VHF data link) FIS (flight information services) data link weather; VDL radio graphics; and global positioning system (GPS) moving map graphics.
Conventional navigation systems provide various displays that a pilot has to page through one at a time for situation awareness. Such displays typically include graphical information related to the above data such as airport environment, airport information, weather mosaic, lighting strikes, area weather conditions, current airport weather, map overlays, and terrain overlays. Such displays need to be viewed and analyzed during the high workload of the critical terminal phase of the flight. A pilot will make certain decisions with respect to a landing approach based on all of the information at hand. In general, it is not quick or easy to make entries into aircraft navigation systems. Thus, reducing the time it takes to modify flight plans would improve flight safety and efficiency.